My journey as a woman and mother of young children who is dealing with metastatic inflammatory breast cancer

The long version… just a couple little things.

Many of you have heard this before but for those who haven’t – here goes. I’m going to do this in stages so I can get it all in.

Early April – Opening Day, April 6th actually – I wake up with really bad back pain. I figured that it was related to sleeping funny the night before, one kid had slept on one side of me and the other on the other side and I couldn’t move. We walked all over downtown that day and it was all I could do, and this was after taking Tylenol or Motrin or something which may not seem like a big deal but I never was one to take much medication. It wasn’t better within a day or so and I then attributed it to picking up my children and working in the yard etc., all the things we attribute back pain to.

Around that same time, neither my Husband nor I remember when, I noticed some changes in my right breast. It may have been a week or two before the pain in my back but it wasn’t long. I thought I had a clogged milk duct, my son had been weaning. I knew how to handle those but I couldn’t get it to clear, the hard spot was getting bigger and my breast was getting painful to the touch, not fun when a child rolls into you in the middle of the night.

Then I lost my appetite. Came down to breakfast one morning and nothing, nothing, was appealing. I started to lose weight, had lost about 5 pounds and went to do the MS walk with my friend Trish on Saturday April 25. As we were walking my right shoulder got more and more sore. I actually was in tears and stopped at the ‘medics’ at the water stop. Nothing wrong, just shoulder pain. So that week I called my doctor. I hadn’t been in awhile and they could see me Tuesday May 5th. Cool. I tell the doctor I have these three wonky things going on and that is my limit so I need to figure it out. He checks me out, says “Let’s get a mammogram, a lot of times a breast infection can cause back pain and upset your stomach”, no sense of urgency so he wasn’t worried either. Go to scheduling, I’d had a mammogram at Good Sam 5 years ago so we decided to stay consistent and go back there, they could see me in two days on the 7th.

Now we know the breast pain was really cansur, the back pain and shoulder pain was from metastasis to my bones and we know the appetite and weight loss was from mets to my liver. Inflammatory bc often gets mistaken for a breast infection. If you or someone you love is diagnosed with a breast infection, that is probably all it is, BUT if there is not improvement after one round of antibiotics, insist they look further before agreeing to more. There are women who use up valuable time with this aggressive type of bc taking antibiotics that aren’t going to help.